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The standard British whinge every year, everyone voting for their neighbour prevents the UK winning it. This ignores a few things:
1.) Ireland doesn't give the UK complimentary votes.
2.) A lot of European nations don't get on with their neighbours - can anyone see Serbia and Bosnia giving each other top marks, or Latvia to Russia?
3.) The UK entry is shite every year, and usually by some talent show reject trying to revive their non-career.
4.) There's a point where saying it's because of the Iraq war doesn't wash any more - such as when you're out of tune and hitting flat notes left and right, like Jemini a few years back...

Yes, there is a certain amount of block voting (Greece and Cyprus seem to give each other top marks every year), but it seems to be the British who use it as an excuse about their annual humiliation - of course, nobody considered that, if the voting is along political lines, why would the majority of Europe hate us?

Also, it's important to remember one thing: Lordi won for Finland in 2006, which was great!

Ahh, got a laugh from CNN whinging about paying the equivilent of 75p per litre on petrol: we pay £1.16 ($2.32) per litre in the UK, so stop your f'n whining!

Of course, UK petrol prices may as well be represented by a pie chart outside the petrol station: one chunk for actual cost, one chunk for fuel duty, and one for tax...

At 5/20/08 11:35 PM, KeithHybrid wrote: We already have a well-armed militia. It's called the National Guard.

Which was created by two pieces of legislation: the Militia Act of 1903 - an Act that stated that, rather than disorginised rabbles with guns, all militia should conform to Regular Army orginisation within five years (i.e. by 1908). On top of that was the National Defence Act of 1916, that changed militias from individual state forces to the US Army Reserve, which is where the National Guard was created.

I forget who posted it in this thread, but in the unlikely event of the US being invaded (simply because the Atlantic and Pacific put any invasion plans in the juristiction of the US Navy and USAF due to the fact everyone but Canada and South American nations would have to cross either the Atlantic or Pacific ocean - and if it were a South American nation, the US Army would be the first to go in), but the fact is plenty of gun owners would more likely be a hindrance than any form of help, because they have no military training, or have weapons that would be unsuitable to urban warfare - a handgun isn't much use, for example.

Whilst there may be some militia groups who could be useful in individual cities and/or areas, on the whole would anyone trust somebody who missed the message of Menace II Society with the future of their nation?

Alright, for the last week my connection to the world has been the Cannes Metro, daily updates of Screen International and Variety, and CNN: so, what in the name of hell has been happening in the world that I may have missed, as it appears 50,000+ need to die before you're considered important enough to qualify for CNN's World News...

Although, as far as I'm aware, they haven't walled off Scotland due to a flesh-eating virus...

Logic shall and will not be tolerated in political discussion!!!

Off to Cannes this weekend for the next week - can somebody fill in with the casual flippancy and overuse of the words "shite" and "bollocks" in my absence?

So, if you read about Paris Hilton getting headbutted, just presume it was me...

At 5/13/08 05:06 PM, Christopherr wrote:

At 5/13/08 11:36 AM, D2Kvirus wrote: Is it really that difficult to sort out?

I believe the pronunciation is the same.

Margaret Thatcher was a Conservative and Tony Blair was a conservative - same pronounciation, far different emphasis and implications.

There's a simple solution to this, of course:
* If you're from Lesbos, you're a Lesbian.
* If you're a gay woman, you're a lesbian.

Is it really that difficult to sort out?

Just caught Doomsday. Wow, batshit mental film - GO SEE!

As I said a week ago when I brought the subject up - it took them 2500 years to notice?

It's true - in the 60's, Mandela was considered a terrorist. Tony Benn got pillored in the press for supporting him, which today sounds almost unthinkable.

At 5/7/08 02:45 PM, Idiot-Finder wrote: How much longer do you think this thread will last? Place your bets!

One week and counting!

At 5/7/08 01:01 PM, butsbutsbutsbutsbuts wrote: I'm glad the conservatives won, this will mean an increase in economic freedom which will boost the economy and open up more opportunities for people.

It also means that somebody was smart enough to realise that if they wanted to scare the shit out of Labour, they shouldn't vote BNP: they should vote Conservative...

I find the logic of their defence remarkably illogical - "A couple of cops got shot, so that makes it OK for us to drag random people out of their cars and give them a shoeing." Errm...how?!? Where does it state, in any legal document, that the police have the right to execute Eye For An Eye at random intervals if a certain number of them are killed in the line of duty?

It's not the fiurst time I've heard this - when the Metropolitan Police were in the (proverbial) firing line after the Menezes incident, they did come up with "One officer was shot and killed in Bradford." So, a member of a different constabulary being killed in the line of duty makes it OK to empty a clip of a semi-automatic pistol into an innocent man's head, and repeatedly lie to cover up what they did (which, obviously, didn't work).

Does this mean ordinary people can take this approach in their everyday lives? Does this mean if someone dinks your car in a parking lot for the third time this year, it's perfectly OK to take a sledgehammer to their windscreen?

As for saying criminals have no rights, had any of those being booted actually been charged or convicted for any crime at the time? If not, they aren't criminals - they're suspects.

At 5/4/08 03:43 PM, Loch-Ness-Monster wrote:

At 5/4/08 03:16 PM, D2Kvirus wrote: I cannot fathom why so many people voted BNP as a protest vote, considering that both Brown and Cameron have spoken out against them. When you get two people (allegedly) opposed on the political spectrum uniting on something (Blair and Menzies Campbell also spoke out against them, meaning at one point all three major political parties actually agreed on something), that's usually a hint that perhaps they might be onto something.

If I were going to vote for a small party, the leaders of the main parties speaking out against it would make me all the more determined to vote for it! I have absolutely no respect for the leaders of the main parties, so their opinions wouldn't sway me in any way. If anything, I would consider it to be an indication that the small party may actually be able to challenge the dominance and vested interests of the established political class. If you hate the main parties there's no point in voting for a smaller party that's pretty much the same, you might as well not bother voting. Also, the idea of Brown and Cameron being opposed on the political spectrum is laughable.

And if you had no idea about the BNP, their policies, their attitudes and their reputation, you have no right to be on the Electoral Roll.

Part of me also believes they got so many votes because they were first on the ballot, so once again if people are going to tick the first name they see to do their ballot rather than know who they were voting for (which is a bit hard as theysent out booklets of all the candidates two weeks prior), again they do not deserve to be on the Electoral Roll.

I repeat, if the leaders of all three main parties agree that the BNP are a bad thing, maybe that means that the BNP are a bad thing. Ever think of that?

Besides, that logic reeks of the crap the UKIP were spouting in 2002-4, trying to make themselves out to be some forbidden fruit that Labout didn't want you to vote for - Labour, Conservative and the Lib Dems justshrugged them off,and they duly faded into the background amidst infighting and breakaways.

There were plenty of opportunities for protest votes on the ballot - Green, Left List, UKIP (who used the protest vote to gain some publicity, but little to no influence, in 2001-3), Christian Choice, English Democrat...oh fuck it, Green, Left List, or a bunch of nutters and scumbags.

True, but the best way to scare the shit out of the main parties is to vote the BNP. That still wouldn't be enough to ever get me to vote for them, but I can see why people do.

No it isn't - spoiling your ballot is the best way to scare them, as spoiled votes are counted in the final figures. If, say, 5% of ballots are spoiled that is the same figure that voted BNP - and the BNP wouldn't have a seat on the London Assembly, would they?

I can see plenty of reasons people vote BNP - intolerance and racism top the list.

"I'm a Lesbian." "No, I'M a Lesbian!!!"

It took them 2500 years to think of that? God, who next - the population of Thespiae?!?

A UK couple on holiday in Portugal had their young children temporarily taken into protective custody after they collapsed drunk, officials have said.

Staff at the Aparthotel Mourabel, in Vilamoura on the Algarve called police after they passed out on Friday night.

The children, who are all under six, were taken to a children's home in Faro while their parents were treated at a health centre in Loule.

The couple did not comment, but the home's director called it "shocking".

Dr Luis Villas-Boas said: "It is the first time it has happened in my 22 years working at this home.

'Extreme neglect'

"It's normal for a couple for one to drink while the other doesn't drink. The problem here is they were both passed out.

"It was extreme neglect and abandonment. I hope somebody carries this information to the UK so these parents can at least be seen because these children are indeed at risk."

He said his children's home was called shortly after midnight and asked to provide emergency shelter for the youngsters.
The couple, who have not been named, are thought to be from Northern Ireland.

On Friday afternoon they arrived with their children at the Aparthotel Mourabel in Vilamoura for a one-week holiday.

The hotel manager said the couple and their three children went out for dinner nearby at about 2000 local time on Friday.

Upon their arrival back at the hotel about two hours later the father passed out on the sofa in reception and could not be woken, he said.

The manager said the mother of the children had tried to return to the apartment with the children, but was "struggling with the pushchair, swaying around from side to side".

'Out cold'

"We put her and the children inside the bar. She was sitting on a chair and she fell asleep and never woke up.

"We tried to wake her, we tried to put some water on her face and head to wake her but she was very, very bad. She started to be sick every minute."

A spokesman for the local police said they were contacted by hotel staff at 2200 local time because "the children were crying and they could not revive the parents, who were both out cold".

He said: "We arrived to assess the situation and called the INEM (Portugal's national medical emergency service) as the parents were unconscious, and they were taken to hospital.

"We called the social services. We looked after the children until the social services arrived and they took them away."

The incident occurred on the eve of the first anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, who went missing from her family's holiday flat in the Algarve while her parents dined nearby.

(Here)

365 days too late, in other words - yet nobody seems to want to note the link between Story A and Story B...

At 5/4/08 02:49 PM, Loch-Ness-Monster wrote:

At 5/4/08 01:17 PM, D2Kvirus wrote: The worst thing of all is that my neck of the woods saw Boris get half the vote, and the BNP rank 4th overall - luckily overall the Greens were Best of the Rest, but it worries the piss out of me that people are turning to the BNP. So, people are being seduced by the policies of a party who regularly have their members charged for racist and anti-Semetic sloganeering, and have copies of Mein Kampf under their beds?

I doubt that people are being seriously seduced by the more overt racism of the BNP, it's probably more of a protest vote. Although I wouldn't vote for them, I can understand why a lot of ordinary people might be tempted to. The main parties have become barely distinguishable and have only treated ordinary people with contempt. The blame lies with them.

I cannot fathom why so many people voted BNP as a protest vote, considering that both Brown and Cameron have spoken out against them. When you get two people (allegedly) opposed on the political spectrum uniting on something (Blair and Menzies Campbell also spoke out against them, meaning at one point all three major political parties actually agreed on something), that's usually a hint that perhaps they might be onto something.

There were plenty of opportunities for protest votes on the ballot - Green, Left List, UKIP (who used the protest vote to gain some publicity, but little to no influence, in 2001-3), Christian Choice, English Democrat...oh fuck it, Green, Left List, or a bunch of nutters and scumbags.

The blame doesn't lie with the parties, because people should be intelligent enough to know what the BNP represent, and voting them as a protest vote is incredibly stupid - look how it panned out.

As for the result, I'm indifferent. I hate Red Ken and am glad to see him gone, but I don't care much for Boris either. I probably wouldn't have bothered voting. Local elections over here are in a few days and I'm too young to vote. If I wasn't I wouldn't bother anyway, there seems little point.

I voted Paddick, witjh Ken as #2 - I'll leave it to you to consider if that was a tactical vote or not.

At 4/27/08 06:06 PM, Leistungsfahigsten wrote:

At 4/27/08 02:00 PM, D2Kvirus wrote:

At 4/27/08 10:48 AM, Leistungsfahigsten wrote:

At 4/27/08 10:41 AM, D2Kvirus wrote: the usual leftist tripe

Spare me your sixth grade Michael Moore "logic".

Spare me your intelligent response. Oh, wait, you did.

Yes, because people should trust in their own government, never question it, and lean not to their own understanding, because "we don't know any better".

You're aware that P&T admit they're biased, right? Or that they don't encourage any form of debate AT ALL? Just a little nugget of information for you...

In my PhD program we take stats courses and every methodology course we have crime rates are one of the things we look at because the correlation is so strong. As income/education goes down, crime rates go up. Everywhere this is true.

As I keep saying, this may work as a general rule of thumb, but it just doesn't cover that X Factor between the one moment where an area may be violent, and where it suddenly tips into gun crime - there's still a gap in there.

It is patently simplistic, but some people seem to be more trigger happy than others: South African whites display a cold logic that dictates it's fine to own a gun and use it when necessary. Farmers/landowners are the obvious example, but under Apathaid there was a law that stated that you could shoot anyone you saw fleeing from a scene - a law that saw Louis van Schoor kill 39 blacks and/or coloured (mixed race) in a three year spree, which a blind eye was turned to until it got so obvious what he was doing they had to act. As I've repeatedly shown, South Africa has the highest gun murder rate in the world and second highest murder rate.

Yes, there's mass poverty - but not amongst the whites. The highest proportion of gun users aren't blacks or coloured, either - it's the Asian and White population, and it's Coloured that are on the receiving end of them by a large margin, followed by blacks (coloured also use guns the least). This doesn't add up to the theory of poverty = gun crime.

In the UK, again it doesn't add up - Northern Ireland is the poorest region of the UK, and whilst Belfast has the highest murder rate, again they don't use guns like the (habitually) specified areas of London or Manchester.

This is what I'm getting at - why do some areas pick gun crime whilst others don't? It doesn't follow the logic of "They're black/Latino" cellar constantly spouits like a racist idiot, and it doesn't follow the socio-economic lines, either. Yes, the argument of availability obviously comes into it - guns are easily available in the US, in the UK you have to pay a hell of a lot over the odds for a converted replica (thus you would need to know where to get one, and not have any problem in breaking at least three laws in order to get one).

If there's a theory worth putting into practice, it's considering the gated communities/council estates/tenements, which could be argued to be the breeding grounds for a lot of these problems - Hackney has gated communities, Peckham, Streatham and Moss Side have a lot of council estates as oppsoed to regular districts - indeed, in South Africa it's argued gated communites aren't helping the crime problems one iota, whilst council estates in the UK (and tenement buildings in Scotland) can often be the sort of place you wouldn't walk after dark on your own - unless you happened to be a Fifth Dan in Thai boxing, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying several canisters of teargas. It should also be added that these areas have a mostly white population (although the media constantly reinforce the stereotype of blacks inhabiting the areas and turning them into Boyz n The Hood, of course).

Yet why do council blocks near Croydon seem happy to stick with GBH and stabibngs (in fact, this time last year there were three fatal stabbings in a half mile radius of each other), yet in Moss Side they graduated to shooting each other? I may as well blame the Irish element of the community if I wanted to simplify it to that level.

There are places you can just say X = The Reason, such as the drug trades in Columbia or Thailand, but it doesn't count. Although what would be interesting is if the Chinese statistics were released - comparing Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing would be interesting, although if Kowloon bay put Hong Kong way over the top it would back up the poverty theory if it was by a large margin.

Three things about Thursdays Elections I really don't like:
1.) Boris won
2.) The BNP have a seat on the London Assembly
3.) The BNP are getting an increasing number of votes

The worst thing of all is that my neck of the woods saw Boris get half the vote, and the BNP rank 4th overall - luckily overall the Greens were Best of the Rest, but it worries the piss out of me that people are turning to the BNP. So, people are being seduced by the policies of a party who regularly have their members charged for racist and anti-Semetic sloganeering, and have copies of Mein Kampf under their beds?

Great, the country is returning to being the shitheap it was in the mid-to-late 70's.

RIP Albert Hoffman

The accidental inventor of LSD (and person to have the most incredible cycle ride home from work at his lab in Basel that day) has died at the grand old age of 102.

And they say drugs are bad...

Also, anyone want to 'fess up about voting for Boris Johnson to become Mayor of London or, worse, getting the BNP on the Greater London council?

At 5/1/08 04:50 PM, TheMason wrote: The game is barely out a day and the kiddie crime wave begins...

In the UK, it was two hours before the game was released.

The thing is, the story from Croydon (i.e. my back yard) was hideously bad reporting, for the following reasons:
1.) The game had not been released yet, so could not be blamed for it. By that logic, blame queues.
2.) There was an altercation between one person in the queue and somebody who wasn't - the person in the queue was stabbed, then went home to get a knife and seek vengeance. It's as if this is another example of the gang-related knife crime we have here.

It's like trying to blame the game for the people who are mugged for copies - people were mugged when the iPhone came out, so is the iPhone evil? In 2005 there was a riot outside an Ikea that was opening at midnight, so does that make Ikea evi...wait, bad comparison. As for the guy with a broken jaw, he tried to cut the queue, so again this implies queues are evil and he had it coming, to be frank).

So, rather than report on youth crime, they slant a story to make the game evil. Does anyone remember when proper journalism existed?

At 4/29/08 03:26 PM, PantyWipe wrote:
So, what did you guys do last night? I just sat at home, took some percocet and caught wrestling last night. All in all it was a pretty good night.

Get bloody irritated at the news reporting about GTA IV corrupting young minds (see the link in the GTA topic I created), played a bit of Persona 3, started drafting a blog, visited my Greek empire on Rome: Total War, and watched the bonus material on my ROH: Driven DVD. Oh, and slept.

As GTA IV was released yesterday, that should be plenty of time for Jack Thompson/Fox News/Keith Vaz/The Daily Mail to have manufactured any stories to demonstrate the game is poisoning the minds of all and sundry that play it. So, if you have one, post it here so we can compare the general bollocks of it all.

We've already had a couple of stories here in the UK, on the release date FFS, and my take on them is listed here.

McCannwatch

In a documentary on ITV tonight (the same channel that gives Meather Mills a regular platform to prove she's nothing but a deranged fantasist), two things of note come up:
1.) Kate's story has changed again - at the time, she rushed out and said Madeleine had been kidnapped, when people stated this is a completely unnatural reaction she changed her story to say she hadn't, and now she's saying that, actually, she did say she'd been taken. Also, members of the "tapas seven" apparently said she'd been taken to Morocco or Tnisia, right then and there. That's even less natural.
2.) Apparently it wouldn't have happened if they took a buggy. Errm, three kids, one just under four years old, but one buggy? Don't be so f'n stupid - nobody'll believe that one.

Also, there's a clip to show their mail is split into categories: "Sightings", "Visions", "Nutty" and "Nasty" - they also show what one nasty one says - "Fucking theiving bastards...your brat is dead because of your drunken arrogance."

Fair comment...

At 4/27/08 01:20 PM, SevenSeize wrote: I want this.

I want THIS!!!

At 4/27/08 10:48 AM, Leistungsfahigsten wrote:

At 4/27/08 10:41 AM, D2Kvirus wrote: the usual leftist tripe

Spare me your sixth grade Michael Moore "logic".

Spare me your intelligent response. Oh, wait, you did.

Furthermore, I am not saying that the middle-class or upper-class never murder anyone. I am saying that there is a strong correlation between violent crime and being in a lower socio-economic class. With the exception of "white-collar crime", crime rates across the board increases as income and education levels decrease.

What I'm saying is that this isn't 100% true - whilst Detroit may fulfill this, there are more violent places than El Paso. What I'm saying (before going off on tangients left and right) is that the "accepted" knowledge of gun crime can be applied to one area but not another, yet there never seems to be anyone willing to acknowledge this. It's like trying to blame blacks and Mexicans for all gun crime like out good friend cellar has repeatedly done - this kind of thinking fails as soon as you look at Florida, as it means the blacks are having to step up to fulfill the Mexicans' quota.

Finally your mis-interpret my comment upon localization. I was not refering to a specific geographical region such as a state or city. So your discussion of poverty rates in the various states and municipalities is irrelevent. What I was getting at is that there is a correlation that in areas that are economically depressed and lower educational rates the crime rates increase. These places can be found in all states and all municipalities (big, small, urban, rural).

This is true - however, how is it my neck of the woods (Croydon) seems to be an epicentre of illiteracy and does have both gang crime and knife crime (and has the most violent crime of all London railway stations), but no gun crime - whilst Hackney has similar conditions (in fact, it's worse for all to the point of schools closing down), and has been compared to Sowetto in the past? There's something else other than education and poverty that isn't accounted for.

What I'm saying is there can't be a sliding scale where if a subgroup passes a certain point of poverty/illiteracy/non-education a switch flicks and it becomes Compton, because that's the same logic applied to most Moral Panics (see: Cho Sueng-Hui being reported as watching Oldboy ten times, as if he was sane before watching it, and was putting together an arsenal by their eighth).

Sorry D2K you do not argue against what I said (or to give you the benefit of the doubt, what I did not say clearly). Nor does your argument buck the trend that a plurality of violent crime is related to other illegal activity.

I was talking of this idea of one moment there isn't gun crime, the next there is - in reference to gun homicides. Pro-gun apologists simplify it the worst to blacks/Mexicans/criminals, but there is this grey area that needs exploring about when an area goes from being poverty-ridden to a gun crime hotspot. Mainly because, as already mentioned, my neck of the woods fulfills many of the criteria listed by various people in this topic, yet hasn't graduated from assault and stabbings yet.

The same can be said for Glasgow - they have similar or worse conditions than Manchester, so should have similar crime - but whilst Manchester has some areas that are notorious for their gun crime, Glasgow isn't - they have the second highester murder rate in the UK (which goes Belfast - Glasgow - Manchester) but withou gun crime, which is bizarre - especially considering the poorest areas of both Manchester and Glasgow (and Liverpool, which has increasing gun-related incidents) are home to large Irish communities, yet the London areas are more reknowned for their black communities (albeit the criminals aren't always black - albeit they think they're Menace II Society - work that one out!).

D2K, I kinda resent this insinuation here. I largely stay out of the US vs rest of the developed world arguments. I don't care what you think about the US' fetishization of firearms. I don't care what your laws are or how you live. Furthermore, I do not want to impose my country's values/rights on the UK. So I by and large stay out of that fray.

I wasn't referring to you, merely the poster I said I was just sick and tired of having to shoot down the same argument repeatedly, only to see it copy & pasted out once again.

I vaguely remember receiving those. Nice to know you're on a database somewhere...

At 4/26/08 01:02 PM, TheMason wrote:

At 4/26/08 06:50 AM, D2Kvirus wrote: Meanwhile, you also remain beligerantly ignorant of the difference in UK and US gun crime: in the UK, it's use of converted replicas, and the crime remains almost entirely based within the criminal fraternity (gang member vs gang member), and within very few areas: a handful of London boroughs (Hackney, Streatham and Peckham - the latter two next to each other), as well as districts of Manchester and Liverpool. Not nationwide, as in the US.

So, the media is against America, rather than the fact over 15,000 Americans are filed under "firearm-related homicide", whilst over here 73 are filed under "gun murder"?

The thing is the US and UK is not so different in that the vast majority of gun crime is gang v gang or related to the drug trade. Even with the highly sensationalizied trend in school shootings. And again the violence is not as widespread as you think in the US. Most crime is done in specific locales that tend to be the lowest socio-economic classes. Furthermore, the majority of guns are obtained illegally.

The legality issue is always disputible - saying all guns used are illegal doesn't work, simply because not all gun murders in the US are committed by gang members, for example the amount of times one family member shoots another with the household's legally purchased gun and other such fatalities. Even Columbine was committed with legally-purchased firearms.

Whilst school shootings get the most coverage because the event is now a media template (look at the coverage of Columbine and VT - they are almost identical, with the only new additions being trying to blame video games instead of Marilyn Manson in the eight years inbetween), they do not make up the majority of the statistics.

Meanwhile, the locales aren't so specific - whilst California is disproportionatly ahead of the rest of the country with the fatality rate (ahead of Texas), New York and Florida are near identical, and Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia are all close (Louisiana, North Carolina, Maryland and Ohio are another cluster) - of that list, only Florida and California rank in the Top 10 for poverty.

On the flip side, Detroit, El Paso and Miami are the three cities with the most families below the poverty line (which indicates there's reason to link poverty to gun crime in Miami - before we get a little bit Scarface - as well as Detroit), but on the other hand El Paso (#70 - apologies for the Wiki link) is behind Houston (#15), Dallas (#23), San Antonio (#40), Fort Worth (#47), Corpus Christi (#52), Arlington (#63), and Austin (#69) in the murder ranks (and just ahead of Plano at #72).

Also, the US ranks 16th on the Human Poverty Index (the UK at 15), so why isn't there a higher crime rate in, for the sake of argument, Japan, Sweden or Switzerland? The best comparison would be Ireland: o.5% less live below the median income, but 0.9% more are long-term unemployed, with 2.26% lacking in basic literacy skills.

You can attribute the drug trade to the high gun homicide rates in Columbia and Thailand, and poverty to that in South Africa and Zimbabwe, but gun crime in the US doesn't fit into such simple patterns - there are too many cases that break from the pattern to simplify it to that point (let alone cellar's standard - coincidentally, as you spent a year ignoring valid points tyhat shatter yours to pieces, I'll just ignore your response, since I've disproven it about 16 times by now and I really cannot be fucking bothered anymore).

Therefore, if you look at the history of prohibition in the US you'll see a history of failure. Booze & drugs are wars we are not winning. What makes you think a prohibition on guns would be effective? I mean we're not an island...

The problem with prohibition is that it creates the idea of the forbidden fruit (I include the legal drinking age of 21 in the US within these parameters), because there's something that is available to some but not to others, or something that was available but now is not. The issue here, of course, is how available guns should actually have been in the first place (commence three-week long discussion on the Second Amendment, again I just cannot be bothered).

But the US also has a fetishisation of guns wihich a majority of other countries doesn't have, simply because of the Second Amendment, meaning that their image can be twisted into being something that represents America, and something that made America (conveniently ignoring that over 600,000 Americans - 1/53 of the total population at the time - were killed in the Civil War with them, of course). The UK, in comparison, doesn't have an image of guns as part of the national psyche (ours usually involves fighting wars with the French, various England/Scotland wars, or gutting it out against Germany - getting stuck in with anything that isn't nailed down or uniting in the face of an enemy and never surrendering) - our national weapon of psyche is probably the broadsword or the cannon, if you consider Trafalgar (although it is the longbow for Wales).

The problem with America is they have the image of having the "right" to bear arms, but the problem is that when "rights" get involved they will be used to a person's own ends: hence you have 12 year olds spitting on you in the street, knowing that if you give them a well-deserved crack around the head you'll be charged for violating their children's rights over here (trust me, I'm pretty sick of it).

So, you have people saying they have the right to own a weapon, despite the fact they do not need one, and there are people who will use their excuse to say they have the right to violate others' basic human rights by sticking them in their face, or shooting them, or any other of the uses guns were created for.

Hypothetically, America would not have the problems with gun crime they do if the idea that people have the right to bear arms, therefore they have the right to own guns, therefore it is Unconstitutional to say otherwise was nipped in the bud early on and there were more safeguards in place when it came to who could own one other than what they could afford. Unfortunatly, that never happened because, just like with guns, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are also fetishised as examples of what is truly American, so the problems stem from there.

Not helped with pro-gun apologists lying and manipulating facts left and right to try and prove America doesn't have a problem, everyone else does...

At 4/27/08 06:33 AM, Kiharus wrote:
This is un-acceptable, who cares about her anymore?

You won't be saying that when she goes all Patty Hearst.

Actually, if that happened that'd f'n rule!